Scriptiegegevens

Gestures are bodily communicative actions, typically involving movements of the hands and arms, which are synchronous with speech and co-expressive but not redundant (McNeill, 2007: 23).
Traditionally, gestures have been seen as a conduit for semantic information (Cassell, McNeill & McCullough, 1999). However, some work has investigated the social information conveyed by gestures, either as a result of semantic mismatches (Beattie & Sale, 2012) or in the absence of semantic information (e.g. Rule & Ambady, 2008; Bailey & Kelly, 2015). For instance, Rekers and Rudy (1978) have suggested that aspects of gender identity are also conveyed through gesticulations, though their work did not actually investigate perception of this identity expression by interlocutors. Those who have investigated perceptions of gender identity (e.g. Birdwhistell, 1970; Frieze & Ramsey 1976) looked more generally at nonverbal behaviour without controlling for the precise contribution of individual communicative modes.
With the above in mind, current study will attempt to answer the following question: how do differences in hand-shape and gestural space configurations affect social judgements about gender identity made by individuals? A social judgement task was created using 20 items from the Bem Sex Role Inventory (Bem, 1974), to which 120 participants responded on a five-point Likert scale to various adjectival descriptors. The study used a between-subjects design, so participants watched only one of four stimulus videos: a mock advertisement enacted by a male or female using masculine gestures, or a male or female using feminine gestures.
Independent t-tests based on the scores of ten items per condition found that the only significant result was that the female-feminine gesture condition was more feminine than the female-masculine condition. However, no significant differences were found between the male conditions for either the masculine or feminine scores, and no significant difference was found for the masculinity scores when comparing the female conditions.
A secondary analysis combined the scores of all 20 items, and found that the male-masculine condition and the female-masculine condition were perceived as significantly more masculine than their same-sex feminine-gesture counterparts. The female-feminine condition and male-feminine condition were both perceived as significantly more feminine than their same-sex masculine-gesture counterparts.
The results suggest that interlocutors do indeed glean social information from structural variation in gesticulations. Thus, co-speech gestures should not simply be conceptualised as contributing semantic information to verbal output. Rather, they have a demonstrable influence in the perception of identity – specifically, gender identity.